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Friday, September 27, 2013

Farmhouse Fridays - Broccoli and Worms... and all that jazz!

For the first time ever, we grew broccoli in our garden this year. I love broccoli. We eat it dipped in ranch, cooked and drizzled with cheese and in soups and casseroles. Broccoli is a wonderful green vegetable and really vitamin rich, so we try to eat as much of it as we can. Our three year old loves it, too! This year, we grew it in the garden for the first time. I now feel that I have a new relationship with broccoli, one where I know all of the dirty little secrets about it.

Broccoli is prone to worms in the Midwest. Yes, I said worms. Green, broccoli colored worms. Really hard to detect worms. Really squishy in your mouth worms. I took that too far, I know. Seriously, they are disgusting in a really wormy, green way. In the Spring, we grew broccoli for the first time. After growing the starts that we picked up from the greenhouse, we were thrilled when something that appeared to look like broccoli shot up out of the center of the plant! Once it was the size of a typical store bought head of broccoli (but without the ends flowering), we took a knife out and cut the bunch off of the larger plant. I then cut it into smaller pieces into a large bowl.

I soaked the broccoli in SALT WATER to get the worms out. After soaking, I rinsed each piece several times searching for worms in between each branch. I found several still even after soaking. Make sure to check as many times as you need to check to feel comfortable eating your produce.

We froze broccoli in family size portions for 4 months. We washed the broccoli well and placed enough for one meal into a gallon freezer bag. We placed into the freezer. We boiled it to our desire once we were ready to eat the product. I sprinkle with salt and a little cheese after boiling. There is no broccoli that tastes as good as home grown!

There you have it for this week's Farmhouse Friday post! What veggie have you been dying to grow?